by Selja Ahava
Luckily, I don’t feel any pain.
That must be a good thing: there’s no pain.
Is it me standing here? Is that my panting I hear, here, next to the gym equipment? Please help that woman now, gods; have mercy on her. How come I’m so alone? Couldn’t someone run past, at least? Come and cuddle me, here by the chanterelle.
The water ebbs. No, this isn’t happening. So that’s how it is. The water ebbs and my skin holds out. This isn’t happening.
This is not my life. Walk. I carry on walking.
AND THAT WAS THE
END OF THAT
1
Once upon a time, there was a father who went hiking in Lapland. He hiked all alone, even though it was dangerous, because you can break your leg in the forest and then you’re in trouble.
On the third day, Father heard tinkling in the forest. He didn’t know if it was morning or evening; his watch was in town and the sun shone day and night. But he heard the sound and then spotted Mother between the trees. She was walking with a bell tied to her rucksack; it chimed to repel bears. Mother had come to Lapland on her own, too. She was soaking wet, because she had just waded through a wide river to get to the shop more quickly. Crossing the river shortened Mother’s trek to the shop, which sold chocolate, by two days. Father found the wet Mother enchanting, and he shared his remaining chocolate with her. He had five pieces left, and Mother received three of them (an important point).
Father and Mother found themselves in love, and away they walked from the fell.
Mother lived in a small village at the edge of a big forest with her three aunts, whom she called Auntie Brown, Auntie Marshmallow and Auntie Uncle.
The small village comprised only five houses. The forest, in contrast, was so large that you could walk through it to the Soviet Union and Lapland.
When Mother got home, Auntie Brown, Auntie Marshmallow and Auntie Uncle were terribly cross because Mother had gone to Lapland on her own in secret. It didn’t make any difference that Mother had taken a bear bell with her. Then the aunts got angry because Mother had come back from Lapland with the bearded Father. No one quite knew exactly why Mother, an educated person with a degree, lived with three aunts in the middle of nowhere. But Mother brought Father into the house of the three aunts, who sniffed in a dissatisfied way. To everyone’s surprise, the aunts took to Father and fed him cake and casserole. The following summer, Father repaired the sauna roof and the aunts forgave him everything. Then Mother and Father got married, had the Lovely Baby and moved to Sawdust House. And that was the end of that.
Mum and Dad had their own versions of the summer they met in Lapland. I liked them both. But perhaps I liked Dad’s version more because the mother tinkling like a bear bell sounded like a character from a fairy tale. I also liked the way Dad mimicked the dissatisfied aunts, who ended up cooking him casserole and calling him ‘our Pekka’.
Mum’s version concentrated on the three aunts. I was afraid of them because they sounded so strict and the sur-rounding forest was so big.
Mum was better at describing the Lovely Baby. Dad really wallowed in the way the doctor cut Mum’s tummy open and Dad nearly fainted, while Mum’s version concentrated on me alone. I was pale and beautiful, with large, round eyes and an orange snub nose. A woman in a cafe asked if the baby had a battery inside – it was as sweet as a doll!
The three aunts were real, but two of them died while I was still the Lovely Baby. Auntie Marshmallow was alive and in a care home. Sometimes I went with Mum to visit her there. Auntie Marshmallow lay in bed and Mum told her about the garden and the vegetable patch, and asked for advice about how to look after some of the plants, though she never followed it.
In the end it turned out that Auntie Marshmallow lived longer than Mum. She was brought to the funeral in a wheelchair. She sat there with a confused expression on her face, as if she didn’t understand what was going on. Her skin looked as thin as tissue paper. The floral wreath trembled in her hands, and eventually, someone picked it up from her lap and placed it on Mum’s coffin. That’s when Auntie Marshmallow became agitated and her wheelchair was pushed away.
That wasn’t the last time I saw Auntie Marshmallow; I went to see her again with Dad. We were living at the manor house then, but because Dad didn’t want to talk about Mum and wasn’t able to talk about the vegetable patch, we didn’t go again.
After Mum’s death, Dad’s story became crushed ice. Once, he tried to tell it, but when he got to the part where Mum crosses the river, he stopped.
Mum was interrupted, and we couldn’t tell the end of her story. Mum was a character in a fairy tale who rose from a river and wandered through dark, gloomy forests to the Soviet Union and Lapland and back. And if characters like that die, they don’t die in vain, and stupidly. They don’t abandon the Lovely Baby, whose clothes they warm in front of the fire; at least, they don’t go away without leaving a message. I waited for a message for a long time. I read books and thought that one day, a letter would fall out of one of them and everything would be resolved. Or perhaps Mum would have underlined some sentences and all I had to do was find the right book. And I thought about time and the fact that in those underlined words, Mum would be here and now, even if it were only one more time.
Auntie Marshmallow remained in the care home. The Lovely Baby was covered by a wall panel and we moved to Extra Great Manor.
It was a bad ending, but it was the best we could do.
2
The end of the world would be good, maybe. Everything would end at once, and it would be clear. The dinosaurs died because a meteorite collided with the Earth and everything went dark with ash. I like that image. A thick carpet of ash falls softly over the globe like Auntie Annu’s wool, and everyone dies. At some point, later, when the soil is being dug up, the thick, grey carpet will be found inside the earth. It will be everywhere, evenly, in every country. And inside, asleep, will be dinosaurs, animals, trees and all the grassy fields of the Earth.
If the end of the world doesn’t work out, there’s always an alternative: Paradise. Auntie Annu said she heard Paradise will only come if all the people in the world are without sin for one moment. One moment would be enough, but it would have to be the same moment for everyone. A world without sin for one small, shared moment, and Paradise will pop out. A trumpet will sound, angels will swoosh and the world will end.
I’m not sure about Paradise. I don’t trust angels.
Sometimes, in the manor house, I used to lie in my metal bed and imagine ways of getting Paradise started. If everyone could be made to sleep at the same time, it might work, because you can’t sin when you’re asleep, even if you’re having a nightmare.
Or maybe it could be announced on TV, on the news, and in the papers: tomorrow at eight o’clock everyone has to be absolutely still for one minute and not do or think anything bad. I wondered how the information could be got to every person, even those who didn’t watch TV or read the papers. If you started spreading the word early enough, would absolutely everyone get to hear about it? What about people living in a jungle or criminals in prison or people whose language no one else spoke? What if someone didn’t want to be without sin at that very moment? Could you force them? Those were the sorts of things I was thinking until my grey cells got all knotted up and I fell asleep.
If there’s no ending, there’s no story. Jesus knew that when he organized Easter. That’s why you can’t bypass the end of the world. And that’s precisely why the ministers at the Easter service got on my nerves when I was little: they really knew how to ruin a good story.
Maybe not everyone wants Paradise. Maybe most people don’t want any kind of ending because they’re afraid of death. And that’s why Paradise doesn’t come, and things just happen.
And perhaps, after all, that’s why the world goes on: because things happen. Overlapping, at the wrong time, at different times, in the wrong places. If everything were in order, as the angels command, if the angels said ‘don�
�t look’, and everyone obeyed, we would end up in Paradise with one blast of the trumpet. But the world goes on and life happens, because there’s always a person who peeks all the same. Someone forgets to watch the news, someone starts a quarrel when they shouldn’t, someone else just doesn’t feel like being good, and someone happens to be standing at the edge of the garden when a lump of ice falls. And that’s why we’ll never reach Paradise.
3
Krista is asleep on the sofa. Her trouser buttons are undone and her shirt is rolled up; her big, bare bump lies there in the middle. Blue veins pass under her skin like cables in a wall. Her belly button sticks up. Maybe it’s a button for lighting up an aquarium. The skin is so thin and so tautly stretched that if there were a lamp inside her belly, you’d be sure to see through it. Dark shapes float inside, in the cloudy water among the veins: liver, spleen, Krista’s guts and an embryo.
Krista sleeps but her belly doesn’t. According to the doctor, it’s a miracle that the embryo is alive. I think it’s miraculous how the whole, gigantic, white belly flops from left to right. And then does it again. There’s a mermaid inside Krista, I’ve heard Dad say so. Krista’s belly holds a half fish but it hasn’t got scales or legs. And we’re not allowed to talk about it.
Sometimes Krista rocks on top of a gym ball, sighing. She lets out sounds and gets into positions that make me feel embarrassed. She goes on all fours in the middle of the living room with her watery belly hanging like a sack between her legs and her arms. She lotions her stomach and picks off the hairs that have suddenly sprouted above her belly button. Sometimes she can’t reach them and Dad has to pull them out with tweezers. She does breathing exercises that make all the mounds of her body rise, and occasionally a fart comes out.
One day, a friend comes to visit Krista, and they sit in the armchairs in the living room, drinking tea and chatting. They’re talking about something to do with breasts; her friend’s pregnant, too. Then Krista suddenly says, ‘Can I show you?’ She undoes her shirt and takes out her breast. She squeezes her nipple and says, ‘Isn’t that crazy?’ Then they both laugh, because a drop of sticky milk has come out of Krista’s nipple even though no baby’s been born yet.
My breasts are still small. I put sports tape on the nipples so they don’t stick out through my T-shirt. If you use the tape too often, though, you get a rash.
After her friend’s gone, Krista asks me to chop up salad ingredients with her. She always wants us to prepare food together, but she has these strict rules.
I hope she won’t undo her shirt buttons for me. To be on the safe side, I decide to tell her a story.
‘Once upon a time, a sheep gave birth at the manor house,’ I begin. I don’t let on immediately what kind of story’s going to follow.
‘Really?’ Krista asks, snipping a cucumber into slices with a knife. Her slices are thick, and she cuts them by holding the cucumber diagonally. She thinks that gives the best result.
‘One evening, a leg and half a head were hanging out of one of the sheep’s bums.’
Krista laughs.
‘Auntie Annu tried to help and gave it a bit of a pull. But the lamb had got stuck. Its leg was folded and its elbow was bent and it didn’t have enough room to get out.’
‘Did you call a vet?’
‘No, Annu fetched Dad. Then they tried to pull together. Annu held the lamb like this, Dad was pulling the lamb out, and every time he tugged, the sheep cried like this: Baa! Baa!’
‘And Dad let you watch?’
‘It was a bit like a toy with a string you pull. Baa! Baa!’
‘That’s bad.’
Krista tips the thick, slanting slices into a bowl. Then she takes an avocado, cuts it in half and opens it up. She smacks the seed hard with a knife and turns the avocado over.
‘The tugging took so long that it got quite dark. I held the torch and lit the sheep’s bum up. In the end, Annu phoned some man, who explained how the lamb had to be pushed back and turned round into a better position. Guess what, Annu’s hand went into the sheep this deep!’
I stretch out my arm and point to my elbow.
‘Then Auntie Annu began shouting like this: “Ouuuuch!” Dad and I got frightened ’cause we didn’t know what was going on.’
Krista stares at me and my arm.
‘Are you having me on?’ she asks, looking unsure.
‘No. The sheep’s bum closed up and Annu’s arm got stuck inside.’
‘Like a contraction?’
‘Yes. They say it hurts a lot. Then, when it was over, Auntie got her arm out. And then the lamb’s leg went into the right position and it was born. It was really slimy.’
‘Wow,’ Krista says, going to wash her hands. ‘Pekka’s never said anything about that.’
‘If your baby gets stuck, maybe they’ll do the same to you.’
‘Hardly.’
‘The next morning the lamb was dead. Even though Auntie took it to a warm place and made it sneeze like you’re supposed to. It still died.’
‘Listen, I’m going to go and rest for a bit,’ Krista says, leaving the kitchen.
I don’t even have time to say that the story isn’t finished yet.
Dad and Auntie Annu drank brandy after the lamb had been born. Dad sent me to fetch the coat he had left in the meadow. I took a torch along with me.
Tree branches always look so strange when you shine a torch on them. As if they were being X-rayed. Black became white, and surprising things became visible. My own light-blue coat shone brightly. I hoped a bat wouldn’t bump into me.
The sheep dozed in the grass; they were faint, faded blotches in the middle of the dark garden. They were behav-ing as if nothing had happened. The lamb and its mother had been carried to the warm barn.
Just as I saw Dad’s coat, in the sheep pen, the torchlight glinted at the edge of the enclosure.
A fox was standing there. Its eyes lit up like two round lamps as the light hit them. I stood still. The fox stiffened a little but didn’t stop eating. Its mouth was wet. What was it eating?
I walked closer and picked up Dad’s coat. There was a heap of shiny, blood-drenched pulp lying between the fox’s feet. I realized it was the placenta from the birth of the lamb.
When I stood up again, the fox gulped audibly. Then it snatched up the leftover placenta in its mouth and slunk away into the darkness.
4
Once I saw a programme about an Indian girl who had never seen a man or a boy naked, not even without a shirt. When the girl’s breasts began to grow, she imagined that the man’s chest had two hollows into which the woman’s breasts would sink. That was the way a man and a woman fitted together. She thought so up until the day of her wedding.
I liked the Indian girl and how little she knew. I imagined Indian breasts pressing into male, Indian holes, two hearts beating close to each other and warmth spreading into every nook and cranny.
5
I wake up, hearing a noise coming from the direction of the chest of drawers.
Grating, crunching, then the occasional metallic click. I can’t see the chest of drawers; the whole room is too dark. I’m too scared to put the light on; I just lie still under the cover and listen.
It’s the sound of scissors. Somebody is using scissors in a dark corner of my room. They’re cutting slowly, as if the scissors were blunt or the material too thick. I can’t see anything but I can hear the scissors clearly. First a click, then crunch, crunch, crunch. The scissors are labouring away; the darkness persists.
Suddenly, I see a grey line. It runs from top to bottom in the middle of the blackness in the corner. And as the scissors cut, the grey line gets longer. Someone’s cutting a hole in the dark. The darkness is black but it’s backed with grey. The line curves and finally acquires a shape. It isn’t a door; it’s a tall, slim figure cutting itself out. It is the hole. The hole has detached itself from the dark and is now starting to move.
Terror strikes my chest. I gasp for air. There is not
the slightest sound. Blood throbs in my ears; all I hear is the hammering of my own blood.
In books, ghosts are white, but this ghost is black. Sheer, cut-out darkness. And as it walks, the darkness closes up behind it.
It’s holding a pair of scissors and it looks like Mum. As soon as I recognize Mum, I stop trying to shout. It’s Mum. After all these years, Mum has come back as a ghost.
The ghost has got Mum’s hair and Mum’s tall body. It’s got its head intact. Its fingers are bony and the smoking hand is raised in that familiar way, though it isn’t holding a cigarette right now but a pair of scissors. Its knee clicks in a familiar way. It’s Mum, only it’s empty. It’s Mum who’s been taken away, a hole left by Mum in my bedroom.
The ghost walks to the end of my bed, and my toes feel chilly. As if the dark were sucking me towards my toes, as if my toes were going to break off soon. And perhaps they will, because now the ghost is raising its scissors. They’re the downstairs nail scissors, which I use to cut my toenails, only now they’ve grown to the size of kitchen scissors. I start kicking the quilt and shouting. And suddenly my lungs pop open, like a bottle, and my voice comes back. The darkness sparkles and I’m a kicking, screaming mess of blanket.
‘Saara, Saara, Saara.’ Dad repeats my name as he strides up the stairs.
‘Stop kicking. Open your eyes.’
‘My eyes are open!’ I shout with my eyes shut.
‘You must have had a nightmare,’ Dad says soothingly. He strokes the blanket on top of my head.
I daren’t open my eyes.
‘What kind of dream were you having?’ Dad asks.
I shake my head firmly. Then Dad just sits on the edge of my bed and lets me be. In the end, I come out from under the cover, my hair and neck wet with sweat.
‘You’ve got growing pains,’ Dad mutters. He pushes sweaty strands of hair off my face. These days, that’s Dad’s standard explanation for everything. Dad can’t believe some of Mum’s old clothes already fit me. He thinks growing up that fast must hurt.
